This is so wrong, I don't know where to begin responding to this. Apparently, you don't follow congressional politics, if you're going to claim that the Democrats have made progress from 1980 to today.
Obviously their overall course has been downhill.
But they have been very successful in cleansing their 20 base states of Republican senators.
If they had not, there would be 65-70 Republicans in the Senate today. Instead, we allow RAT Senators to be re-elected without serious opposition from Montana and North Dakota-states where the President gets more than 60% of the vote.
This is as if the Democratic party in Massachusetts didn't run a candidate when Ted Kennedy retires.
It's disgraceful.
I think he was saying that the Democrats have not won the "macro" war since 1980 but they manage to prevail by "micro" and "minority" means. It is they who know where to be when an issue comes up for a vote, and they are merciless, unlike the cowardly PR-dumb GOP.